In case you forgot (I personally did, except that FTC rulings does not apply to us non-US based bloggers I guess), the revised FTC guide states that

“…the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

Material connection means that the blogger or endorser receives any form of payments for endorsing/reviewing any products. I’m just not sure whether this covers tech bloggers who receive demo units of products that they review and then returns the products afterwards.  Are their reviews bias or unbias based on FTC’s rulings?

Anyway, have you acted upon this new FTC guidelines?  What have you done to adhere to this new clause in the FTC guidelines? Have you incorporated individual disclosure for every product reviews you make or you just did a general statement.

The thing is how can the FTC prove that you did not receive any payment in cash or in kind for a product that you are reviewing if you can just place a disclaimer saying that you did not?

But auto-posting using an autoblogging plugin such as WP Robot, which just released its version 2.0, is not really my cup of tea. In case you’re not aware, autoblogging is used by blogs that were created for affiliate marketing purposes or revenue-generating schemes through the use of aggregated content culled automatically from affiliate networking sites.  Examples sites of this are Amazon, Clickbank and eBay.

So, where does WP Robot fits into the scheme of things? This plugin can actually help these type of bloggers save time while earning more advertising revenue from their blogs.  You can set specific intervals when WP Robots will do its job – hence better scheduling of your blog posts.

WP Robot 2.0 now lets you post Yahoo News content to your blog. Or even any RSS feeds that you want to feed into your blogs automatically.

Other new features of WP Robot plugin include – the ability to cloak your outgoing affiliate links, backdating your posts to the pasts and scheduling your posts at a future date. The Plugins admin panel was also redesigned.

While many bloggers will shun away this WP Plugin, we’ve got to admit the fact that there are a lot of bloggers who would recommend installing this plugin.

Let us know your take on this in the comment section. Is WP Robot a plugin that you will most likely install on your WP blogs?

If you don’t mind paying for the Twitter iPhone app, then Tweetie 2.1 with its new features is definitely for you. Or if you are already a Tweetie user, you might want to get the new version of the iPhone app to use those features.  It’s a free upgrade for current users of Tweetie 2.0.

Of course aside from retweet, lists and geolocation features, you’d also get tons of other new features as well as bug fixes for problems in Tweetie version 2.0.

With that said, I’m still having second thoughts whether I should get Tweetie 2.1 or be contented with my current iPhone Twitter Client – Tweetdeck.

How about you? What Twitter client do you use on your iPhone? Will you be willing to spend for a Twitter client such as Tweetie 2.1?

Reports had it that Twitter Japan’s latest move to differentiate it’s service from its global counterpart is a tierred payment model that will charge Japanese Twitter users for viewing tweets from Premium Twitter accounts. How’s that for Twitter being a free online communication tool?The paid subscription model for Twitter Japan will start rolling out in January 2010. By then Twitter users who have probably amassed loyal Twitter follower will have the option to charge their followers for viewing their Tweets. Sounds like Twitter  suicide to me.

The premise is that these Twitter users who will opt to charge their followers have so much valuable links and perhaps thoughts in their tweets that justify the charges.

Those who are willing to pay the subscription fee may pay the subscription cost on a monthly basis or they can buy prepaid tickets that can be found at convenient stores in the streets of Japan. Another payment scheme is through pay-per-tweet option which will be charge through the user’s credit card or deducted from their mobile carrier billings.

Such a well-designed income generating scheme, right? If this kind of deal will be offered by Twitter globally, do you think it will succeed? Are you willing to pay for a tweet?

So aside from the recent geotagging feature that was rolled out recently, WordPress.com has also introduced another important feature – email subscriptions. Yes I know,  like me you are also wondering why WordPress.com took this long to have this feature. But hey, better late than never, right?

Anyway, to add email subscriptions to your WordPress.com blog, you need to add the blog subscription widget to your blogs. Fortunately, it’s just as easy as clicking a button once you logged on to your WordPress.com account.

Once activated, your readers can easily subscribe to your blog updates and receive them through email. The email sent to your blog subscribers will be in HTML format, so images and formating will be retained, giving your readers the same look and experience as when reading your blog updates from your WordPress.com site. Your blog readers can also opt to receive email updates in text format.

In addition, your readers can also control their email subscription to your blog – that is set frequency of receiving emails as well as cancel their subscription anytime they want to. They really don’t need to inform you that they want to cancel their subscription to your blog updates. They can do it themselves.  In addition, you need to approve all new subscription to your blogs before your subscriber can receive your email updates.

So what is Pixazza really?  In their own words:

Pixazza is a new platform that allows shoppers to buy products from photos seen on websites of our web publishing partners. Our unique capability allows these web publishers to generate  incremental revenues by “visual commerce enabling” the images that already exists on their websites.

So what is it again? It’s an internet service that serves interactive and engaging online ads through blog images. The visual ads are activated once a user hover on any picture on a particular blog or website.

In short it’s like AdSense, another blog income generating scheme for us bloggers. For blog readers, it could either be a useful service or just mere annoyances.

But unlike AdSense which generate targeted ads through search advertising algorithms, Pixazaa does it manually with its army of photo taggers.  Yes, it is possible at this early stage of Pixazza with around 100 photo taggers who identify relevant products to serve on blog publishers’ sites.

Will it still be possible once Pixazza goes mainstream?  We will know by then. But then,  are bloggers willing to use Pixazza on their blogs?

According to Pixazza, there are already a dozen sites using their system.  Will these publishers earn? Will users actually use blogs to as a shopping tool?

Want to see Pixazza’s ad program in action? Check out this sample site.

When I asked a couple of days ago why Matt Mullenweg was in Microsoft’s PDC, I was never really expecting Matt to read my post and answer the question. Back then, it was just reported that he was called onstage by Microsoft’s Ray Oozie but what he talked about was not reported yet then.

A good fellow that he is, Matt was kind enough to leave a comment on my post and posted the link to the transcript of what transpired during the PDC, particularly on what he talked about.

The transcript is very long so, lazy that I am I just scanned through the document until I found Matt’s part of the show.

Matt demonstrated an example of a WordPress blog running on Azure on the background. The point of the demonstration was to show how multiple blogs can handle traffic surges whenever a blog post gets an unprecedented spike.

And the implication? – WordPress  can be adopted by businesses as part of their Azure applications. Come to think of it, WordPress being an open-source CMS doesn’t get that much acceptance in the corporate environment. Putting it as part of Azure’s computing products can pave the way for application of WordPress in corporate intranets.

Anyway, before I misinterpret Matt’s reason for showing up at the PDC, here’s the full transcript of what he talked about.

MATT MULLENWEG: Good morning, everybody!

Do we have any WordPress users here in the audience? Nice! Thank you, thank you.

I’m very excited to be here. Just to give you a little bit about my timeline, about six years ago, as a 19-year old poly-sci student, I started working on an Open Source GPL, PHP and MySQL project named WordPress. About four years ago, I founded a company called Automattic to bring WordPress to the masses, which was done to about 200 million people with WordPress.com.

Then about a month ago, I get a phone call from a guy named Jeff Sandquist, and he says, Matt, remember that thing I told you would never happen, and I said, what’s that? And he said, we’re going to have MySQL, PHP, and Apache support on Windows Azure.

So, I looked outside, peaked out the window, made sure there were no pigs, and I said, well, get me out there, I’d love to show this. So, that’s what we’re going to be showing you right now.

As you can see, right here on the Azure back-end, and we have a production WordPress blog here. So, I can click on it, and you will see the beautiful big blue header, everything that you’ve come to know and love about WordPress blogs.

But as you know, blogs are no more longer about just personal publishing, they’re being used for big news sites, they’re being used to cover everything. And so sometimes you get varied traffic.

So, as you can see, we have a MySQL and an Apache instance here. Let’s say my blog gets on Slashdot or Channel 9 or Digg or something like that, and we need to scale it up. We go right here in this beautiful XML file and change it from one instance in Apache to — how many should I go to, a hundred, a thousand? I don’t know a thousand to do that.

So, you can put it however you like, though. You just click the button, and that will take you all the way back, it will reload, it will deploy the instances, bring up all the machines, deploy the virtual machines, everything like that, and instantly add it to the load balancer and you have a fully scaled WordPress.

Now, what’s interesting a few months ago, because we had the election cycle in the United States, and we hosted about 10 million blogs at the time. So, we were seeing all range of really some of the biggest traffic we’d ever seen to blogs.

There were two blogs that were at the very top. One was CNN Political Ticker. It had deep, insightful analysis, really talking about the future of the free world was in the hands, hung in the balance in this election. And then on the other side we had a blog with pictures of cats and funny captions, battling every day for top traffic. I’m not joking.

So, to show you one of the engineers behind the other biggest blog, WordPress blog in the world, I wanted to invite out Martin Cron, who is one of the engineers behind I Can Has Cheezburger. Hey, Martin.

Pikk is a link aggregation service that lets users submit and vote on stories. Every story is submitted with two choices, such as “thrive or fail.” Stories with the most votes make it to the front page.

In other words, Pikk is actually like Digg and the rest of other social bookmarking and votings sites but with the added twist of giving you more options on how you are going to rate blog links or news items.

Pikk aims to give bloggers and publishers or to be specific since it’s a fairly new service, not so well known bloggers and publishers to drive more traffic to their sites. It offers the usual voting features wherein the most voted and commented stories go to the front page of  the site.

The site also has some other goodies to offer including a polling widget that you can attach to your blogs to elicit more interactions, search and topical keyword-cloud navigation, browsing of voting patterns, viewing the most disputed stories and other useful navigation features.

Pikk.com is a well conceptualized blog link aggregation tool, no doubt about it. It has all the flavors and goodies that you will look for in a site like it. In fact, Pikk even offers more.

But in an already saturated social voting site market, I just couldn’t help but wonder whether Pikk.com stands a chance at getting into the mainstream especially with the likes of Digg, Mixx, Delicious, Twitter and Facebook offering some of its major features?

Well, probably if you will join Pikk and starts using it to give your blog a much need traffic juice then Pikk might just pull it through.

According to reports, WindowsAzure will let Microsoft’s corporate clients to write code on a cloud-based OS running on Microsoft’s data centers. WindowsAzure is about to go live sometime in January. It’s obviously a paid service which will have business corporations as the main clients.

But what was Matt’s business there?

Is Matt a customer or a collaborator? Either way it doesn’t seem fitting. We all know that Matt is an open-source advocate, having built WordPress on top of various open-source architecture platforms.

Will WordPress be one of WindowsAzure’s offerings?

Bernes-Lee’s trip was part of  the Web Foundation’s, a non-profit organization founded by Berness Lee, task of bridging the digital divide between users of the Internet. Currently, around 70% of people have mobile access but only 25% of the world’s population is using the Internet.

To kick off its noble projects, the Web Foundation announced two major partnerships – one with the University of Amsterdam and another with the Center for Digital Inclusion. Both partnerships aim to educate young people in African countries on creating web content which will have mobile component.

Sir Berner-Lee is currently in Egypt where he will be coming from on his way to Kenya and Uganda next week.

Image credit: World Wide Web Foundation

Actually, what the article was saying is that reader engagement on blog has drastically changed, not so much blogging per se.

To put the findings of PostRank study in a simpler manner, it should be said that reader engagement on blogs which is used to be through blog comments  has been reduced quite significantly the past couple of years. The culprit – the “like, comment, and sharing” features of social networking and microblogging sites such as Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.

In other words, readers are no longer commenting on blogs but are now reacting to blog posts via Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed.

What the study didn’t clearly state is whether reader engagement = blog visits. Meaning once a reader stumbled upon a link to a blog post whether on Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed, does the reader actually click on the link and read the blog posts? Or does the reader just leave a comment on the social networking site itself?

The study also mentioned something about the longer life span of blog posts now as compared to before when social engagement is not prevalent.  This is pretty understandble since link sharing on social networking sites can circulate for several days or weeks perhaps. Unlike when reading a post on the blog’s site itself. After reading it, you may or may not leave a comment. You may share the link or forget all about it in an hour or so.

Bottomline? Blogging  has not changed through the years, only the way readers are engaging on blogs  has.

It’s a pretty interesting read especially since blogging in exchange for a “taste of company products” and other freebies that come with it is no different from tech bloggers receiving demo units of new gadgets for review. Tech bloggers would die to get those sample demo units and review them on their blogs ahead of rival bloggers.

So what are we now bloggers? Purveyor of truth or corporate pimps?Blogger sorties is prevalent today. Even in the Philippines, I’ve seen and heard bloggers attending this and attending that, receiving this and receiving that. Don’t get me wrong here, I’ve got nothing against these bloggers. It’s a free country after all – a free world in fact.

But then don’t we all have the responsibility to our readers? Shouldn’t we maintain impartiality when reviewing or endorsing or even just mentioning about a product in our blogs? How can we do so if the company who owns the product we own just send us free samples of those products?

Does maintaining impartiality really possible in such instances?

Check out the LA Times article. You will be surprised at how the food blogging scene has become such a very nice niche for bloggers.

Fox sent 150 DMCA takedown notices until YouTube was forced to shut down the channel since it has a clear policy on “3-strike” copyright violations. Of course political bloggers who comment on the YouTube videos as well as those who use it as a central point in their blog posts got mad and are now attacking Fox News. This group were advocating that it was an abuse of the DMCA rule.

News1News is currently up on a temporary site. Until when it will be there remains to be unanswered.

The question is, was Fox News just exercising its DMCA rights? Or was there any political motive behind this?

]]> http://www.blogherald.com/2009/11/14/fox-news-cracks-down-a-youtube-channel/feed/ 2 http://www.blogherald.com/2009/11/13/wordpress-com-rolls-out-geotagging-feature/ http://www.blogherald.com/2009/11/13/wordpress-com-rolls-out-geotagging-feature/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:56:32 +0000 Arnold Zafra http://www.blogherald.com/?p=15015 WordPress.com’s free blog hosting site has just rolled out geotagging of posts. This opt-in feature allows you to identify your location whenever you write a post.

Enabling this feature your blogs can be done either automatically by WordPress.com or you can set it manually yourself.

Aside from geotagging your post, the new feature also lets you tag your profile. This will give you a quicker way of finding other WordPress.com bloggers near your area.

Currently the geotagging feature is useful only for search engine purposes. Geotagging your posts helps search engine identify your location and deliver location-specific search results identifying your blog posts if you’ve turned on the geotagging feature.

This is of course in preparation for WordPress.com’s Geo Search feature which will harvest the geotagged posts and profile of all WordPress.com users who will use the feature right now.

To enable geotagging of posts on your WordPress.com, you need to enable it on your WordPress.com profile. Once this is set, you can start using the feature the next time you put up a blog post.

It’s a pretty cool feature, especially in times when geo-location, location-aware services are becoming the norm among online services.

Hopefully, the Geo Search feature comes out soon, as this would encourage WordPress.com users to use the geotagging feature.

]]> http://www.blogherald.com/2009/11/13/wordpress-com-rolls-out-geotagging-feature/feed/ 6 http://www.blogherald.com/2009/11/12/windows-live-gets-more-partners-including-youtube/ http://www.blogherald.com/2009/11/12/windows-live-gets-more-partners-including-youtube/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:23:52 +0000 Arnold Zafra http://www.blogherald.com/?p=15011 Microsoft has sealed new partnerships with 19 web properties which has been integrated to Windows Live.  This is an opt-in feature, so you can just select which web activity partners you would like to add on your Windows Live profile.

Interestingly, one of these parters happens to be – YouTube. What gives?Anyway, let’s just leave that matter to Microsoft and go on with what this partnership will bring to your Windows Live experience.

For those partners with real-time aggregation of user updates, this parntership simply means that all your activities in those partner sites will broadcasted to your Windows Live network, making it visible to your contacts’ Messenger, Hotmail and Windows Live Home feeds.

Actually, that’s just about what this integration can do. So, what’s in it for us users then?  Windows Live’s partnership with these web companies would simply make it easier for you to inform your friends about sites that you are visiting and have discovered and other interesting stuff  which are worth sharing to your Windows Live contact.

For Windows Live partners this is a great viral marketing mechanisms and great source of user generated content. As for Windows Live, this partnership gives them better companion.

Other popular web activity partners of Windows Live include Multiply, PIXNET, CNET, Baby Kingdom and more.

Now it’s time for a quick question – when was the last time you’ve log on to your Windows Live account anyway?

You never saw this coming, do you? All the while we’ve been waiting for a Google-Twitter integration, Facebook-Twitter integration, and the other online services wooing Twitter’s dearth of real-time information stream.  But look which of them got into Twitter first? – LinkedIn. Yes folks, the Facebook for business professionals jump into Twitter mania and announced their  sealed partnership with Twitter.

So how does the integration works? It’s dead simple.  Whatever status you set on your LinkedIn updates, you can now tweet it to your Twitter account. Inversely, you can now send tweets to your Linked connections as well.

While it is easier to do from LinkedIn to Twitter, which is just a matter of clicking the Twitter share link, coming from the Twitter side would be a bit cumbersome, well just a little actually.

To send tweets to your LinkedIn account, you need to set whether to send every tweets or just those you select.  If you choose to send only a selected tweet, you need to append the hashtag #li or #in to every tweet that you want to send to LinkedIn.

This new feature will be gradually rolled out starting today. You will need to connect your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts via oAuth when the feature is activated.

So, who do you think would benefit more from this integration, Twitter or LinkedIn?  Do you like the idea of mixing your interactions with your business contacts with the non-formal, free-spirited interactions in Twitter?

So, what was that all about? It was actually a story running on MediaPost about Microsoft’s latest marketing strategy to gain more Bing users. The deal is users can have free Wi-Fi access at participating WiFi hot spots  in exchange for “one” search using Bing.

Did that sound awfully cheap? Desperate or what?

But wait given the high-cost of mobile internet access and users getting more into mobile computing, it might actually work, agree?

It might actually achieve its purpose – that is to make more people aware of Bing and let them try the search engine. But the question is, will this be enough to make users continue to use it once the Wi-Fi access is no longer free?

Awareness is one thing, but engagement is another. For Bing to elicit more engagement, the awareness should not be as low as providing free Wi-Fi Internet access in exchange for one search using Bing.

I don’t know about you, but the whole marketing campaign maybe rubbing differently on me.

Anyway, when was the last time you checked out your LinkedIn profile or when was the last time you actually visited the LinkedIn site?  If you do right now, you might see some changes in the site’s design, as LinkedIn is currently testing out a new site design.

According to a post from the LinkedIn blog, the new design is being tested to some users. So some of us  might see the new design, while others may not. For those who can’t seem to notice what has been changed, there are four items really which are all aimed at making it easier to navigate and find information from the site.

These four new features are:

1. A global navigation bar at the top of the page that provides convenient access to all LinkedIn services.
2. Simplified local navigation within each of the LinkedIn areas (Profile, Contacts, Groups, etc.).
3. More room available for page content. Less scrolling.
4. A cleaner, less-cluttered look.

Interestingly, the LindkedIn blog post has this very long explanation on what brought up the site redesign which was started several months ago. The site redesign was said to be based on a lot of factors plus the results of the observations of the LindkedIn crew.

Hopefully, the site redesign would entice current LinkedIn members to visit the site more often and not to log-in to their LinkedIn account only when approving people who want to connect.

Do you check your LinkedIn account as often as you do to your, say Facebook profile?

The study explored one major aspect of social isolation – the role that the Internet  and mobile phone play in one’s core social networks. The study categorically states that Americans’ use of mobile phones and the Internet actually leads to a larger and more diverse discussion networks.  This include Americans’ use of Facebook.Other significant findings of the Pew Internet Study on Social Isolation and Technology include the following:

• the use of the internet and mobile phones lead to larger and more diverse core discussion networks,
• social media activities whether online or on a mobile phone contributes to diverse discussions among people of different background,
• Facebook and other social network activities do not lessen people’s social engagement,
• Internet activities does not affect one’s participation in local activities,
• Internet use does not make people stay away from pubic places
• mobile phone use does not affect people’s face-to-face interactions with other people

To sum up the results of the study, Pew Internet has proven that  internet technologies  are not only use for distant communication but equally for local contact as well.

So, you can stop worrying about your kids, husband and other family members’ internet and social networking activities now.

The Official Digg Blog explains how Digg Trends works:

Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes

The stories shot at 10 minutes of Digg stardom is enough to determine whether it should become popular or not.  This will be determine by the Digg and bury actitivty it will generate during the time that it was put on the spotlight.

Since 10 minutes is a short time for busy people like us who don’t stay the whole day on Digg.com, a Twitter account was setup to inform users when a new Digg Trends is up for voting.

When displaying the current Digg Trend,  the remaining minutes to digg or bury the story is also displayed along side the title of the story and a counter that says how many people have already checked the story.

Digg Trends is cool and adds a fun aspect to the otherwise boring task of digging and burying stories. And it’s also  a clever  way of pulling users back to the Digg.com home page instead of just using the Digg voting widgets to do their Digg activities.

You can follow the action on Digg Trends via Twitter,

But like the Peek blog says – it will be more interesting if we can tweet and reply to conversations in real time, not from behind a PC and definitely not using our mobile phones. In the first place, using your mobile phones for Twitter purposes requires two things – an expensive smartphone that supports Twitter third-party apps and a decent mobile data plan.

And that’s TwitterPeek’s battle plan. To provide a more affordable way of taking Twitter wherever, whenever.  The device will set you back for $99 inclusive of 6 months data service. And it’s actually available from Amazon.

So, should you decide to purchase TwitterPeek,  for what purpose will you use it? I could think of several ways by which this device will useful.

• for brand campaign purposes, especially if you have gathered enough followers
• to consistently promote blog posts, especially if your are always blogging on the move
• to engage in conversations, if you are monitoring the latest trend in your topic interest
• to follow industry trends in real-time

Are there any other possible uses of TwitterPeek that  I missed?

Download Squad calls it a “straightforward, well-organized volume that goes a long way toward demystifying a new and complex tool.” That tool of course is Google Wave, as Google is perpetuating it as a new communication tool.

It’s actually a preview edition of an ebook which will be available for sale sometime January 2010. So, if you’re into Google Wave and you want to learn more about it, read it now, download and copy the manual if  you must, before it becomes officially out for sale.

Be forwarned, it’s eight chapters all in all. Although the manual is written in straightforward manner, still it’s a long read.

Or you can take the route less travelled by lazy readers like me, just use Google Wave and let nature runs its course, so to speak. What? You don’t have a Google Wave account yet? Shoot me an email with your Gmail account and I’ll throw you an invite.

So now, with the Twitter List feature you can finally seggregate people you actually know and whom you actually followed from those whom you did not. Even more fun is the fact that the you can set your list to either public or private viewing mode.  Your Twitter followers can follow the public list you created.

In addition, you will also know when another Twitter member added you to a particular list through the ‘listed” link that appears beside the “followers” link on the sidebar of your Twitter account.

Simply put, Twitter List is a good way to minimize the noise you get when you are reading your Twitter public timeline.

Have you created your Twitter List?  Share it with us by leaving a comment below.

If you want to follow the list I created for SplashPress Bloggers, here’s the link – @aczafra/splashpress media, but it’s not complete yet as I’m still searching for the other  SplashPress bloggers who are on Twitter.

Here’s a rundown of the new features of WordPress 2.0 for iPhone:

• A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
• Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
• New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
• Passwords are now stored in the keychain
• Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
• Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
• Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
• Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
• Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
• Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
• Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded

WordPress 2.0 for iPhone looks better than the previous one which I installed a long time ago but just used it once or twice I think. But this version loads faster and the interface is more appealing. I might use this app more often.

What I  don’t  get is why the app defaults to opening the comments sections rather then the Posts. Makes me wonder which is more  important when mobile blogging – the comments or the posts?

Anyway, go check out WordPress 2.0 here. [iTunes Link]

I really find it amusing to know that the likes of  Sarah Brown, Maria Shriver and Queen Rania are actually active users of Twitter.  And that First Ladies Carla Bruni and Michelle Obama has their respective web sites, with Obama under the White House website.

But I guess nothing could be cooler than Queen Rania who maintains her own YouTube Channel, Facebook and Twitter accounts aside from maintaining her own website.  Her Twitter followers even has almost one million followers while her Facebook accounts has more than 100,000 friends.

During an interview, Queen Rania told CNN that social networks are the best way of connecting with everyone. They are fast, flat and simple tools that anyone with a decent Internet access can do.

“The Internet has made it easier for everyone to communicate with their fans and friends, whether you’re a blossoming blogger or a seasoned politician. For people in my position, it helps demystify the title and clarify what it is I do and what it is that’s important to me,” said the Jordanian Queen.

Speed, ease of use and simple interface are among the reasons that these first ladies cited as reasons why they are engaging in social networking activities and are using social media tools to connect and communicate to anyone.

I wonder if there are still other first ladies and powerful wifes of statesmen and politician who either Tweet or have a Facebook account? Do you know anyone else?

In case you want to follow these powerful women, here are the links to their various accounts.

• Queen Rania’s YouTube Channel
• Queen Rania’s Facebook Account
• Queen Rania’s Twitter Account
• Sarah Brown’s Twitter Account